Open-source Serverless Architectures: an Evaluation of Apache OpenWhisk

The serverless computing paradigm ushers in new concepts for running applications and services in the cloud. Currently, commercial solutions dominate the market, though open-source solutions do exist. As a consequence of this, there is little research detailing how well the different open-source solutions perform. In this paper, one such open-source solution, Apache OpenWhisk, is investigated to shed light on the capabilities and limitations inherent of such serverless computing architecture, and principally to provide further research on this particular solution's performance. This is accomplished through an extensive evaluation of OpenWhisk, involving a variety of experiments and benchmarks

Evaluation of language runtimes in open-source serverless platforms

Serverless computing is revolutionising cloud application development as it offers the ability to create modular, highly-scalable, fault-tolerant applications, with minimal operational management. In order to contribute to its widespread adoption of serverless platforms, the design and performance of language runtimes that are available in Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) serverless platforms is key. This paper aims to investigate the performance impact of language runtimes in open-source serverless platforms, deployable on local clusters. A suite of experiments is developed and deployed on two selected platforms: OpenWhisk and Fission. The results show a clear distinction between compiled and dynamic languages in cold starts but a pretty close overall performance in warm starts. Comparisons with similar evaluations for commercial platforms reveal that warm start performance is competitive for certain languages, while cold starts are lagging behind by a wide margin. Overall, the evaluation yielded usable results in regards to preferable choice of language runtime for each platform

Evaluation of language runtimes in open-source serverless platforms

Serverless computing is revolutionising cloud application development as it offers the ability to create modular, highly-scalable, fault-tolerant applications, with minimal operational management. In order to contribute to its widespread adoption of serverless platforms, the design and performance of language runtimes that are available in Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) serverless platforms is key. This paper aims to investigate the performance impact of language runtimes in open-source serverless platforms, deployable on local clusters. A suite of experiments is developed and deployed on two selected platforms: OpenWhisk and Fission. The results show a clear distinction between compiled and dynamic languages in cold starts but a pretty close overall performance in warm starts. Comparisons with similar evaluations for commercial platforms reveal that warm start performance is competitive for certain languages, while cold starts are lagging behind by a wide margin. Overall, the evaluation yielded usable results in regards to preferable choice of language runtime for each platform